Monday, 6 August 2007

Fate 2

T wo more pages from The Fate of the Artist, 'before and after'. In the first set I played around with the typesetting a great deal more in the finished version. I was aiming for the overall feeling that I recognize in my own lettering, and thinking of images as dropped-in typographical accents. In the second you can see a combination of warm and cool greys in the monochrome version. The text needed to be changed too; since Campbell was supposed to be missing he couldn't very well be supplying the drawings (my post of 6 april connects to this.).

I was wrestling with problems of authenticity at time of the second example. That is, when an illustrator draws a historical period, there's always a problem with an unavoidable feeling of him or her being hundreds of years removed from the subject. While comtemplating the fanciful notion that 18th century artist Karl Schutz (above) employed a rotating cast of characters in his topographical prints, it occurred to me that I could cast modern actors in these historical roles and thus get around the inauthenticity. That is, I'm not drawing the historical period, but instead, modern actors playing roles. Having gotten that far, it was just a short step to casting one of the same in the role of Campbell, since the author is supposed to be missing. ( Originally I intended to draw myself in flashback, or 'cartoon reconstruction'. ) Furthermore with several actors wandering about the 'set' and many extra pages to fill, they started to develop their own personalities and bits of business, adding a few extra layers to an already complicated work.**********Fifty years ago Jack Kerouac's dazzling novel On the Road became the blueprint for the Beat generation and shaped America's youth culture for decades. It influenced scores of artists, musicians and film-makers, but how does it resonate with young people today? -Sean O'Hagan-Sunday August 5- The Observer Carolyn Cassady, the last surviving member of Kerouac's closeknit coterie of friends and fellow Beats, now 84 and exiled in deepest Berkshire, is even more scathing about Noughties youth. 'It's all about money and surface now, the clothes you wear, the things you buy, and no one is the slightest bit ashamed of being superficial. I often thank God that Jack and Neal did not live long enough to see what has become of their vision'.(link via Mick Evans)**********One of my roommates in San Diego was Christian Slade. Brett Warnock shows " a few beautiful watercolors... He made during his trip to San Diego. This one he did looking out the 7th floor window of the Embassy Suites, on Eddie Campbell's bed, looking out on the harbor". Click link for enlargement and more pages at Brett's always excellent Top Shelf blog.***********How to be a successful comic artist. By George Storm, 1923. (link via drjon. thanks). Storm usually got stuck doing sentimental strips typical of his period, but this is very funny.***********Obese Aussies are a dead serious problemPathologists are calling for new “heavy-duty” autopsy facilities to cope with obese corpses that are difficult to move and dangerously heavy for standard-size trolleys and lifting hoists. Specially designed mortuaries would soon be required if the nation failed to curb its fat epidemic, providing "larger storage and dissection rooms, and more robust equipment", said Professor Roger Byard, a pathologist at the University of Adelaide. In the past year, there have also been requests for larger crematorium furnaces, bigger grave plots as well as super-sized ambulances, wheelchairs and hospital beds.

My wife works as a back care advisor at an unnamed local hospital and obese patients and corpses are becoming more and more of a problem. Apart from new, extra large frdges in the mortuary she tells me that it was standard practice for obese corpses to be rolled off the mortuary slab and into a wardrobe size coffin using broom handles. The coffins were then taken away by forklift.